All Good Things Must Come to an End

Well, it is a few days after the end of the 2007 IPAC Annual Conference in friendly Winnipeg, Manitoba. As promised here is my post on the last day of the conference.

The day started out early again with a meeting of the Board of the IPAC Endowment Fund at 7:30 am. Maria-David Evans (DM in Alberta) was chosen as the President of the Endowment Fund and I was appointed Secretary/Treasurer. For those of you who don’t know (that would probably be most of you) the Endowment Fund is a registered charity that is utilized to fund the Pierre de Celles award, the Student Thought Leadership award and now the annual Galimberti lecture. With our new site we will be adding more about the Fund and be asking IPACers to donate to continue with these endeavors and a number of new ideas.

The 3rd day of the conference started with a re-cap of the previous days activities by the MC (me again, just in case you have not read the previous posts). After that erudite compilation of the events, the session heard from Gilles Paquet on “Accountability in a Fishbowl”. Gilles is my former dean when I was at the University of Ottawa @ the Faculty of Administration (now called the Telfer School of Management). He is also a prolific writer and commentator on television. What a speech – if you were not there you missed a very provocative, thought-provoking view of the ills that have gripped some of our accountability mechanisms, with the over reliance on rules, rules and more rules. In no way could I do justice to the arguments put forward by Prof Paquet. The talk left the room quite energized.

Following this performance, Maurice Boisvert, president of the Institute of Public Administration of Quebec invited delegates to the 2008 IPAC Conference that will take place in Quebec City. It will be the 60th annual IPAC conference (the first was held in Quebec City), the 100th anniversary of the Public Service Commission of Canada and the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec City!! There will be a lot to celebrate….book early!

The next session featured a panel on “Building Trustworthy, Accountable and Responsive Government”. The panel was moderated by David Zussman (also from the University of Ottawa and an IPAC Board member) and featured Peter Aucoin, Ruth Hubbard, Howard Pawley and Vice Chief Glen Pratt.

Then it was time for the closing banquet and the announcement of the winners of the 2007 IPAC Awards for Innovative Management that are sponsored by KPMG and IBM Canada. The audience tensed up as the moment arrived….the BRONZE award went to LearnNow BC (BC Education)…..the SILVER went to Nunavut Community Skills Information System (Nunavut Education)…..and the GOLD went to……wait for it……Provincial Wait Times Information System (Cancer Care Ontario). Congratulations to all the participants and to the three winning entries!! You can see a list of all the submissions by going to the awards page of this website and the press release is on the Media page. The presentations from the top three can be found on the Winnipeg conference website.

After lunch, Jacques Bourgault, Professor at UQAM and a past IPAC president gave the inaugural Galimberti lecture. The topic was the evolving role of Deputy Ministers. We will soon be posting the full speech by Prof Bourgault, so watch for it – it was a tour de force.

Sadly, we then turned to the closing remarks. We had a number of speakers addressing the delegates: Debra Woodgate, Carol Layton, Lloyd Axworthy and Jules Lavalee. And, Paul Thomas gave an insightful synopsis of the conference.

Then the MC took the stage…..see you next year in Quebec City!

I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank Debra Woodgate and her team for putting on an incredible conference. Putting on a conference of this magnitude and scope takes an incredible amount of time, energy, planning and caffeine! As a green conference it was great going to the cybercafé and down loading the presentations on the memory stick (you can go to the Conference Website as well) as opposed to lugging home the equivalent of a couple of trees of paper home. The sessions were informative and varied, the social activities were wonderful, the food was great, the organization was superb, the volunteers were friendly and helpful and I think that I speak for all the delegates when I say…..Job well done!

To Debra, Christina, Heather, Nick (my bodyguard!), Diana, Angie, Cheryl, Troy, Matt, Melanie, John, Joan, Kim, and everyone on the different committees and volunteers…thank you!

Another Great Day at 2007 IPAC Annual Meeting

Today got off to an energizing start with a New Professionals Breakfast at 7:00 am. Yes, you read that right - 7:00 am. The session was organized by New Professionals and provided them an opportunity to meet and discuss issues with senior public servants, otherwise known as "experienced" public servants. The session was a two-way learning experience and there was lots of discussion on key questions such as how does one acquire political acumen, how do you deal with requests from on-high that don't really make sense, and what is the best piece of advice that someone gave you as you progressed in your career.

We then moved on to the Opening Remarks from the illustrious MC (me!) who tried his best to recap the previous day's activities and then introduced the 2 keynote speakers for the first plenary sessions on "Service Delivery in a Networked Public Sector". The delegates heard from Alan Latourelle, CEO of Parks Canada and Beth Bell, partner IBM Global Business Services. The presentation by Beth was quite interesting as it addressed IBM's own transformation and how they applied those experiences to their advisory services including for Service Canada and Service BC.

The concurrent sessions on public service delivery were all well attended. The adjudicated paper session on Horizontal Policy was so well attended that the session had to be moved to bigger meeting room.

The keynote speaker in the afternoon, Chief Ovide Mercredi spoke with passion about the issues that affect the aboriginal community and the way that successive governments have ignored the promises made in signed treaties. The afternoon concurrent sessions on challenges and opportunities in a networked age were also very well attended.

The presentations of the finalists for the 2007 IPAC Award for Innovative Management featured 3 incredibly innovative and creative initiatives. The theme for this year's award is "New Service Breakthroughs with Technology". The award is co-sponsored by KPMG and IBM, Canada. The 3 finalists are LearnNow BC, from BC Education, the Provincial Wait Times Information Systems fronm Cancer Care Ontario and the Nunavut Community Skills Information System from Nunavut Education. You can read the backgrounders on the finalists on our website. The Gold, Silver and Bronze award winners will be announced at the Wednesday Luncheon.

The highlight of the day was the President's reception and Banquet. We were honoured to have the Lt. Governor of Manitoba, the Honourable John Harvard and Her Honour Lenore Berscheid attend the Banquet. Other distinguished guests included Paul Vogt, Manitoba's top civil servant, Howard Pawley, former Premier of Manitoba and Lloyd Axworthy, President of the University of Winnipeg. The meal was extraordinary!! After the meal, the awards part of the evening began with the Parenteau award for the best French language article in CPA in 2006 go to Lise Prefontaine and the Hodgetts award for the best English language article in CPA in 2006 going to Ian Clark and David Trick.

Carol Layton then announced that our highest award, the Vanier Medal was awarded to the late Joe Galimberti. Carol Galimberti and Tony Galimberti received the award on behalf of her husband and his father.

The formal part of the evening continued with a speech by Carol Layton on her last year and an introduction of IPAC's new president, Louis Borgeat. Louis then had the opportunity to toast Carol and to highlight his priorities for the next year. Look for an article by Louis in October's issue of PSM.

Once again, the Manitoba organizing committee went above and beyond the call of duty. It was another fantastic day of thought provoking presentations, discussions and networking. Kudos to Manitoba!!

It's close to 1:00 am now and as don't seem to have as much energy as I did when I was younger it is time for me to sign-off. Don't miss my final post on Wednesday night/early Thursday on the last day of the conference.

Making Connections

The first full day of the 2007 IPAC National Conference started today. The day got off to a good start when the MC called the meeting to order. Since I am the MC for this conference, I guess I am rating my own performance here. The distinguished guests at the opening session were piped in by a bag-piper. The 560 delegates heard welcome messages from Dr. Lloyd Axworthy, Honourary Chair of the Conference; Carol Layton, IPAC President; Vic Toews, President of the Treasury Board, Government of Canada; Greg Selinger, Minister of Finance, Government of Manitoba; Annita Stenning, CAO, City of Winnipeg; and Jules Lavallee, Conference Elder. I had the opportunity of introducing each of the special guests who were seated on comfortable armchairs on the stage. As there was no chair for me, I got my workout by climbing onto the raised platform to introduce each guest. Felt a little like a pop-up doll.

The conference then heard from Bill Eggers of Deloitte who spoke about public service in a networked aged. Essentially he spoke about the need for collaborative government. Part of his talk on how Proctor & Gamble are leveraging ideas reminded me of Don Tapscott's book entitled Wikinomics. He also spoke about engaging front line people and citizens to obtain solutions to issues rather than using one or two experts. This reminded me of the Open Space concept. The key for governments in the future is how to use the new web technology and other tools to engage stakeholders and citizens in policy development. I think that we have a long way to go in most Canadian jurisdictions in opening up the policy development process.

The 5 concurrent sessions on Governance Models were well attended. I dropped by the one on P3's but is was overflowing so I went to the adjudicated paper session which turned out to be very interesting.

Over lunch, the Group Excellence award was handed out to the Nova Scotia Regional Group and the Pierre de Celles teaching award was presented to Paul Thomas. Dr. Axworthy then spoke about the need for public servants to globally engage in issues.

In the evening, delegates attended the "It's a Prairie Party" at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manibotain. We had a wide varity of food - Ukrainian, Oriental, Italian, Aboriginal & a dessert buffet. We were also entertained by the Walking Wolf Singers and Dancers, which included a hoop dancer. WOW!! I couldn't fit into the hoop, never mind his performance. The Romanetz Ukrainian Dance Ensemble performed a number of Ukrainian dances that were also quite an aerobic workout. The Asham Stompers performed some traditional Metis jigs, reels and square dances. The youngest member, 7 year old Michael, brought the delegates to their feet with his incredible dancing. Words cannot do his dance justice. The last group were the Fubuki Daiko Japanese drum and flute group. After the show, delegates who still had stamina were dancing up a storm. They are probably still dancing as I write this entry.

Overall it was an incredible first full day of the Conference. The feedback from all has been overwhelmingly positive. The Manitoba organizing group has done a tremendous job and the MC was fantastic!!

Conference Off to a Rip-Roaring Start!

The 59th Annual IPAC Conference un-officially got underway on Sunday August 26th. Over the weekend, the Board of Directors of IPAC met to consider a wide variety of matters coming from IPAC committees as well as other important matters. The Board got a demonstration of this new website & were very impressed by the site, its capability and the exciting future functionality that will be possible with this website. Kudos were expressed to our responsive and imaginative web designers - Treefrog Interactive. On Saturday & Sunday, IPAC hosted an international workshop with some 60 participants from our partner countries and Canadian jurisdictions.

On Sunday, the Annual General Meeting of IPAC was held and was well attended. The new annual report was distributed to attendees (it can be found on this website) and the President of IPAC, Carol Layton spoke about the past year and the renewal and changes that have been and are being implemented. Bill Greenlaw, the National Treasurer presented his report as did the National Secretary, Syd Baxter.

The proposed bylaw amendments were approved unanimously, including the change to my title from Executive Director to CEO. Guess I have to get some new business cards!! The proposed $5 increase in membership fees was also approved - these will be effective January 1, 2008. So if you are not yet a member -sign up now and save $5!!

The Welcome Reception was held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery - also known as the WAG. We had a wonderful reception in the "penthouse" which included a wonderful terrace with sculpture garden and reflecting pool and fountain. I did not notice any delegates fall into the pool, though I may have missed that part. Debra Woodgate, Head of the organizing committee welcomed the delegates to Winnipeg. BTW, there are 564 registered delegates at this conference - the second highest total in IPAC history!!

On a final note - I will be MC-ing the conference over the next three days. I am at this very moment frantically preparing for this new task. I will let you know how it goes.

Click here for pictures!

Gabriel